EU taste for big science excluding small nations, minister claims

The European Union’s smaller member states are being excluded from its research programmes by an increasing emphasis on large project groups, a minister has warned. 

The introduction of five massive interdisciplinary “missions” in Horizon Europe was the latest example of a troubling pattern that began in the late 1990s, Kristina Kallas, Estonia’s minister of education and research, told Times Higher Education. 

“With every programme further there has been a belief in Brussels that big is beautiful,” she said. “Under those missions, and for a country of 1 million with a total number of researchers around 8,000, it’s very challenging to be part of this gigantic pan-European consortia.

“For a medium- or a large-sized country, to provide a team of 10 researchers for one consortium is quite feasible…but for a micro-country the size of Estonia, a team of 10 researchers is a huge team.”

Ms Kallas, who began her campaign against supersized consortia at a ministerial meeting in Spain this summer, said her Baltic state could not be alone in feeling left out, listing Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta and Slovenia as potential allies.

“We don’t need special treatment, we don't need special mechanisms, because that would marginalise us even more. What we need is a different mechanism for the large consortia where you can have also very small teams,” she said. 

The European Commission declined to respond directly to the criticism, with an official instead noting that project coordinators were “encouraged to take on board the most interesting approaches that come to their attention”. The exclusion of little states “may be a matter of visibility”, they added. 

Dedicated calls already offered incentives to compensate for such oversights, they continued, and commission staff were looking at whether projects involving “societal innovation, as compared to industrial system innovation processes, might require deeper and more localised interaction in smaller projects”. 

However, such work pushed up administrative costs and the Horizon missions could instead include smaller teams by running secondary, open calls for “smaller projects-in-the-projects”, the official said.

Ms Kallas said smaller member states were also being short-changed by rules that set maximum salaries for some researchers on EU projects, calculated by officials in Brussels. Leading Estonian researchers were approaching universities in France or the Netherlands to participate in EU projects and getting the adjusted allowance, which was three times what they would be paid doing the same work from Estonia, she added. 

“The smaller countries, economically a little bit weaker countries, lose out in this and that works against the whole European idea of fair treatment and equal opportunities for everybody,” she said. 

The commission official noted that the coefficient only applied to Horizon’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for researcher training and mobility, adding that brain drain was “a complex issue that depends on a wide range of factors”, including national research investment, the excellence of the local research environment and working conditions.

Ms Kallas acknowledged a tendency towards ever-larger research teams in certain cost- and data-heavy fields, but rejected the idea that the trend was widespread enough to justify the shift in core EU funding, arguing that the social sciences “in general don’t need big consortia”.

“We have this feeling in Europe that if we do it small, then we don’t catch up with China and the United States,” said Ms Kallas. “I think the competitive advantage of European research is that you need to be agile; you’re very quickly reacting to the change of the course of the science. Maybe that should be our competitive advantage.” 

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com